Hanover Girl Scout awarded highest honor

Hanover's Julia Goslin is a G.I.R.L.: she's a go-getter, an innovator, a risk taker and leader, and she’s got the gold award to prove it.

Goslin, who will be a freshman at Stonehill College this fall, has been as a dedicated Girl Scout for the past 13 years, a commitment recognized recently with the highest level a scout can obtain: the gold award.

She began as a Girl Scout in kindergarten as a part of the Girl Scouts Troop 80843. The gold award was obtained by conducting a mock trial.

“When a Girl Scout earns her Gold Award, she has completed something truly extraordinary,” said Patricia A. Parcellin, chief executive officer of Girl Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts. “She has harnessed her creativity, passion for helping others, and determination. She has challenged herself and others in order to take action and effect lasting change in her community. This is more than an amazing accomplishment today; it is an achievement that sets these young women apart far into the future.”

Goslin, along with fellow members of her troop, earned her bronze award by collecting dog and cat food, paper towels and other donations for the Scituate Animal Shelter. She earned her silver award by recording books on tape for her aunt’s kindergarten class in Boston and creating science experiments for the Hanover parks and recreation department’s summer program.

“For my gold award, I worked with one of the teachers at my school who formerly taught government when it was a more busy subject, Mr. Stephen Heggarty,” said the Hanover native. “Now we only have one AP government teacher at the school. When I finished my proposal, I sent it to the Girl Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts and went in for a proposal meeting and it was approved with the hope that I would have the proposal done by the end of my junior year.”

To successfully have a mock trial, at least 10 people need to be involved and only one person regularly would show up for the first year, so the proposal wasn’t completed by the time she hoped.

Once the spring play ended, she was able to convince members of the drama club to take part in the mock trial.

The mock trial case was Midlands versus Covington, where Midlands State Police Department arrested Chase Covington, the chair of the Midlands Gambling Commission, and Avery Bancroft, a local businessperson, on suspicion that Bancroft bribed Covington in an attempt to procure Covington’s support for a new casino license.

Points were awarded depending on how well affidavits were memorized; students playing witnesses were asked to memorize between three to 10 pages of character details, and if they perjured themselves by getting details wrong, points were taken off. The actors playing the “lawyer” characters wrote questions for both direct and cross-examinations, providing Goslin and the others involved a lesson on how to properly word questions.

“We had to learn how not to write a leading question because they can get points taken off as well because they are digging for an answer,” she said. “During cross-examination, your questions can be objected to.”

Since 1916, more than one million Girl Scouts have made meaningful, sustainable change in their communities and around the world through completion of a Gold Award project.